“No, ma’am. I wanted to talk to you for a few minutes.”
Her smile fades a little. “About what?” she says.
I force the name out of my mouth. “Ashley Shawger.”
“I see.” The smile disappears. “Are you a reporter?”
“No. I swear.”
“Who are you, then?”
I take a step closer. She’s easily five inches taller than I am, and her ramrod posture gives her something of a military look. I think of her son Thomas. There is a strong resemblance. “I’m a mother,” I tell her. “Like you.”
She stares at me, pink circles forming high on her cheekbones. “You look familiar.”
“I’m Camille Gardener. We’re both in the Niobe group.”
She narrows her gaze on me, then lets out a long sigh. “Oh yes.” She smiles again and puts a hand on my shoulder, as though I’m an old friend she hasn’t seen in years. “I remember you now.”
THE LIBRARY COURTYARD is small and probably charming in the spring. But right now it feels like something in mid-hibernation, the fruit trees skeletal, the rosebushes as gray and threatening as balled-up barbed wire. Violet says, though, once we’re out here, that it’s the perfect place for a private conversation. “It may not be comfortable,” she explains, “but it’s a small price to pay for no surveillance cameras.”
Violet has brought out two hot coffees, and she hands one to me. “To thaw you out a little,” she says, and the heat of it through the paper cup and the warm steam in my face couldn’t be more welcome. She gestures to one of the stone benches and I sit down, Violet sitting beside me, the cold of the concrete biting through my jeans, the back of my puffy coat. My nose is starting to go numb. “What do you want to know?” she asks.
Between the cold and the subject I want to discuss, there’s no point in taking time for formalities. I jump right in. “How did you feel when Ashley Shawger died?”
She opens her mouth, then closes it again. “Richard Shawger,” she says. “The night he died, I was at an all-night bingo game at a church in Pleasantville. Proceeds went to a children’s literacy organization, and I’m proud to say, I won. Just ask anybody who was there. I was elated.”
“Did it . . . did it take away your pain?”
“Winning at bingo?”
I just look at her.
Violet blows on her coffee, takes a tentative sip. “It’s interesting,” she says. “After Nathan was killed, our pastor told us we could find comfort in our suffering. He pointed out how, after you’ve wept really long and hard, you’re flooded by this sense of calm and peace. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Sort of. I always thought it was exhaustion.”
“Well, the pastor told us that it’s God. Literally. ‘What you’re feeling is God.’”
I have no idea what to say. “That’s . . . interesting.”
“He also said that God only gives you as much as you can take, and that the Lord bestows the most suffering on His favorite children. Lionel loved all that. I thought it was a load of horseshit.”
I smile.
“I mean, really. I wept more than I ever have when I found out about Nathan. I cried myself hoarse when Richard copped a plea and when the judge gave him a sentence that would have been better suited to a jaywalker. For that year and easily several times a year following, throughout all the years since it happened, after my husband drank himself into a heart attack, during and after all those tours Thomas insisted on going on in Afghanistan, all of them suicide missions and he knew it . . . After all of that suffering, I would come home from this job and cry and cry until I had no tears left. I’ve cried more than any person has a right to, and I have felt a hell of a lot of things while doing it. None of them have been remotely close to God. I’ve walked through fire, Camille.”